Break down the wall between your source code and the rest of your project's data!
You keep your source code in an SCM system, you track your work and your bugs in an issue management system, and maybe you've even got a document management tool or a wiki. But can you truly tie all these things together? With CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise SCM (Software Configuration Management) integration, you can finally connect your source code commits with the rest of your project's data.
Get your Developers Developing
Your developers have better things to do than set up and configure project tools like SCM servers. Once you've created a project in CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise, you can add a new repository to it with just a few more clicks. You can go from dreaming up a whole new project to making your first code commit in just a couple of minutes.
You can even add multiple repositories to your project, for example, both CVS and Subversion. Using SourceForge's RBAC (Role-Based Access Control) system, you can easily administer who has access to view, check out, and commit to each repository in your project, by assigning privileges to roles, and assigning users to those roles. These can be the same roles used to manage other aspects of your project - for instance, you can create a "Developer" role, with permissions to view and commit to your code base, as well as appropriate permissions for your issue tracker, document collection, and wiki pages. Adding a new team member to this role grants them all the access they need in order to get right to work.
End-to-End Traceability
By using an SCM system that's integrated with CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise, you can trace your team's work from requirements all the way down to individual lines of code, and back again. A commit to your project's code repository can be associated with any number of other objects in the application - a tracker artifact representing a user story or bug, a task representing a billable assignment, a document describing a requirement, even a wiki page or discussion topic. Simply embedding one or more object IDs in a commit message will automatically create an association between that commit and the referenced objects - which can be seen when looking at the commit itself, or when looking at the object on the other side. Now, instead of looking at a bug report and wondering, "How did she fix this?", you'll be able to trace through to the commit message, and from there to the actual lines of code.
With Subversion (or CVS), you can configure an individual project repository to require an embedded association on commit; this enforces best practices, making sure your developers include a valid object association with their commit. This makes sure that every commit can be traced back to the defect report, requirement or user story that dictated the change.
Connecting legacy SCM systems
Because of familiarity or legacies, different teams may want to use different SCM systems. CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise comes with out of the box with support for three different SCM systems (including Subversion of course). Any project can use one or more of these for managing their source code.
Want to use CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise, but you're using an SCM system that isn't already supported? SourceForge's Generic SCM Server integration capabilities can be used to enable you to continue using your familiar SCM system, but gain the benefits of integration with SourceForge, such as associations with commits. Customers have used this capability to build integrations with a range of SCM systems. A simple command-line script is included that can be used to transmit commit messages to CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise, via the SOAP protocol.
Connect with more than one SCM server
CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise can manage multiple physical SCM servers, which can be geographically separated from the main application server. Teams working far from the main application server can set up local SCM servers that are managed by SourceForge. All that's needed is to run the CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise installer on the hardware, and inform the main CollabNet SourceForge Enterprise application about the new server via a simple administrative GUI. Each physical server can host more than one type of SCM (e.g. Subversion and CVS), and one project can even add repositories from multiple servers!
